Monthly Archives: October 2013

It is interesting to view other artists work on journeys. Cardiff certainly has a different process to mine and gets her audience to participate in a walk. The viewer then becomes the artwork. I wished I had discovered this before visiting New York in the summer as I could have followed the trail in Central Park.

I read the book ‘The Psychogeography of Urban Architecture. The author Prescott-Steed (2013) core research was the above advert called Lose yourself in Melbourne where a woman is seen to be pushing a unravelling ball of wool around the city streets of the Australian City. His research is an in-depth analytical account of psycogeography. He advocates that a distinct feature of the woman’s movements in ‘the city is the extent to which she bears the character of the flaneur (the individual who wanders without purpose).’ (p35)

I have spent a couple of days installing the New York road crossings in a different configurations.

I used the cherry picker ladder to reach the top which is about 5 metres high. It was very wobbly and one of the lectures commented about vertigo which was interesting as I was watching the Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, that evening as part of my reserch. In the film the two main caractors Scotty and Madeline refer to their preferred state of exploring San Francisco as ‘wondering’. Wondering refers to exploration with no fit destination which could lead to being lost. This act of wondering fits nicely into psychogeography…….

There is new freedom in my art which is backed up by research. I have been reading several books over the last few months on the subject of psychogeography.

I feel my art work is not of the standard I usually produce however it is very experimental opening up all kinds of new possibilities which are exciting me to explore.

This exploration drove me to once again marked out the black tape which represented my walks in New York. Parts of the previous tape was still present giving a palimpsest layered effect.

While this work was displayed I requested two 1:1 tutorials with lecturers. Through these discussions I realised the risks I was taking showed great potential.

I have met Alice Kettle on several occasions over the last few years at various events. Last week Kettle came to The University of Chichester and delivered an amazing lecture to the art department followed by several 1:1 tutorials.

Kettle explained in her lecture that “A thread is a line that functions in space.” And “I see the world in thread.” This hit a cord with me. For a while now I have recognised that everything I look at I am trying to process into a map formations and therefor I am viewing the world within a diagrammatic representation.

I was one of the lucky students to have a tutorial. This is the second time Alice has so generous given her time and advise to me.

Alice saidit is good to open up my studio practice to reconfigure and take a risk for this can be very productive. She could see a shift in focus and scale from my previous work she had viewed back in 2010.

The black lines in this work have come directly from my tourist map of New York where my partner had marked out all our walks. Alice suggested mixing the lines of my walked journeys and the photograph installation by using black tape, paper or cloth. I opted for tape. The work had to be removed at the end of the day and the tape could be cut and parts of it could be left on the strips of photographs.

I love the outcome. There is a confusion of layers of palimpsest developing. The lines of the tape are mixing with the perspective on the photographs.

Alice pointed out that she liked how I had hung my work all together on the wall. She said it was a juxtaposition of the multiples in the other work. She didn’t see them as individual pieces but reads them as a collective work which she found really interesting; an urban landscape which had a passageway through it. I pointed out I had written something about this on my blog the previous week and how I was wondering why I hung my work in this formation. I explained how I previously was a display artist for John Lewis. She said that was diffidently part of it.

I decided to add the leftover black tape to this work. I was amazed to see the similarities to Piet Mondrian work that I had recently been studying in New York. After chatting to an other student I got the idea to pair back the pieces of work to see what would happen. This was an exciting experiment which left me satisfyed with the results. What I would like to do now is try mixing the two walls of work together.

Alice said I was making environments, building a definitions of place and a pathway. It’s about multiples of works, when presented in such a way, which suggests the building of urban landscapes. She suggested I continue to build on that.